home is where the heart is
by InsaneCrona
Summary: au. peridot is a ptsd stricken girl too frightened of existence to leave her own house. lapis is her new therapist who seems determined to ruin peridot's life. stay tuned folks.


Sometimes Peridot finds it easiest to scream into a wall, because the wall is quite the ugly shade of beige, and it doesn't stare at her in pity when she sobs at the prospect of even opening the window. It's getting stuffy, but neither she or the wall are human enough to give a damn. Maybe that's supposed to worry her, but she studies this information nonchalantly, digesting her own maladjusted tendencies with placidity. After all, what else is she to do? Her parents hardly speak to her, and when they do they speak in the type of cotton candy talk children usually recieve. The psychologists and therapists she works with take her problems and analyze them and give them causes, and they've given her pills and drugs but they never help. Her friends...well she doesn't really have any. The ones she'd had before the accident ended up slipping away through her lifeless, prosthetic hands. Having a crippling fear of leaving your home does put a cramp on your social life, I'm afraid to admit. Even the doctors find it troublesome to always have to travel to and from her home, often leaving her for months at a time with only the medication they believe best suits her symptoms.

Perhaps it's just her general unwillingness to truly seek out the help she needs, and to instead wallow in a mixture of self-awareness and equal amounts of obliviousness, but Peridot finds it all quite pointless. If the medications are the best hope, and they never seem to do a thing, then what else is there? She refuses to talk more than a sentence because if Jasper taught her anything it was to keep all of your personal thoughts inside yourself, locked deep away in the crevices of your heart. Not your mind, your mind is logical and will try to find solutions for your problems. Instead, your heart, a mindless organ that is only metaphorically cited as the emotional core. Even in the mind, emotions meet logic. Your heart doesn't understand that, because it is nothing more than a vessel. It's job is to keep you alive, not keep you happy.

The clock ticks away at inevitability, and Peridot awaits her newest therapist, whom her doctor had recommended. Lapis was her name, according to the business card Peridot had recieved at least. She prepared accordingly, ready to tell her the generic symptoms of whichever classification they decided to bring up, hoping to quickly end the session and end up with another useless medication that she'd take for three days then give up on. Hopefully the therapist, like most others she'd had, would simply talk about her ptsd and how she treats it. She's memorized the symptoms and has carefully placed them into different words to make it sound more interpersonal, when really it's simply factual information that isn't in any way connected to her. It's worked quite well for keeping her in the exact same state, of which she's grown rather comfortable.

A knock at the door signifies Peridot's robotic movements. She stands, walks with a signiture hunch and one arm desperately clutching the other, with eyes that were nonchalant but with a hint of anxiety tinted in their features. With a quivering hand she unlocked the door and then took exactly six steps backwards to sit in a rocking chair, and proceeds to yell.

"It's open!"

The door slowly creaks open and a girl walks in. She strides rather confidently, but her face spells confusion. She has blue hair, a fact which Peridot notes.

'Perhaps she is one of the lively ones, they're always more enjoyable.' She bites her lip as she considers all the possible endings of this simple meeting.

"Scared of the outside. eh?" Lapis gestures toward the door, which she has left slightly open much to Peridot's dismay.

The mortified look on the girl's face at the sight of a slightly cracked door is enough to answer Lapis's question. She shuts the door and sits on the chair across from Peridot's, adjusting her papers and clearing her throat.

"They have quite a few standard questions on here that are mainly idiotic and don't help me get to know you at all so, if you don't mind, i'll be skipping the introduction questions." Lapis had a rather loud speaking voice, but every word was like audible silk. Peridot strangely wanted her to talk forever, however at the same time she disliked the idea of answering personal questions.

"Uh..mm...I..." Peridot found it difficult to speak, only now noticing how dry her lips were. When was the last time she'd drank something? She couldn't even remember.

Lapis noted this quickly and sat her papers neatly on her chair as she stood.

"Where's your kitchen?"

Peridot opened her mouth, but shut it again after a moment's consideration of the jumbled speech she'd just presented. She pointed toward the kitchen, which was 37 steps left of her chair, exactly 43 steps from Lapis's, taking into consideration her stride and pace. Peridot had unknowingly calcualted this as Lapis had left, most likely a reflex. She'd counted steps for as long as she could remember; calculated how many steps it may take someone to arrive at a destination given how large their stride was and their average pace. It was a decently fun way of wasting time for her.

Lapis returned with a glass of water, most likely tap since Peridot, quite frankly, wasn't sure if she had any other form of liquids. Peridot drank the glass's contents and sat the cup carefully onto the floor. Then, after wiping her mouth off to rid of excess liquids. Then, she spoke.

"...I don't...feel comfortable sharing things too personal. It's...uh...a part of my ptsd...my old girlfriend...and things..." The jumbled sentence was enough. Of course Peridot could form a rather eloquent sentence in her head, but in practice she found it was better to leave things pitifully choked. Lapis coughed and looked up, rather disinterested.

"Let me guess. You've clung to the diagnoses of your ptsd and used it's symptoms as bait to get your other therapists to simply give you medication and leave. And now that I'm skipping the basic questions that you typically answer with the textbook descriptions of ptsd symptoms you're speaking in simple, stuttering language to make me pity you and stop asking questions." Lapis sighed. "You aren't the first Miss Peridot, and you must certainly won't be the last. I'm here to help you and I'm going to do my job, but to do that you have to let down your veil a bit and let me see what you're actually thinking."

"B-but...I'm not comfortable with..." Peridot wasn't exactly shocked, her doctor had mentioned that Lapis was more of a psychoanalyst. Plus, she was hardly the first person to notice her actions and the point they were trying to make. The way she'd said it though, so blunt and harsh, stunned Peridot a bit.

"I won't force anything on you. In fact..." Lapis rummaged in her papers, "here is a questionnare sheet. Fill in your answers honestly and I'll check them when I return in a week. If they're not honest I'll be able to tell."

Lapis handed the sheet over to Peridot then stood with a simple sigh.

"Goodbye Miss Peridot."

Of all the endings she had predicted, this one she hadn't even considered.


End file.
